Sam Dand, a senior manager in environmental services, said: “This is a major change to an already very complicated operation, serving 98,500 households and involving around 8.5 million individual bin collections every year.

“We know from speaking to other North East councils what sort of issues we could face in the first few weeks. We expect things to settle down quickly and to see the environmental and financial benefits coming through.

“We have worked hard to communicate the changes to local people and we sent a new collection calendar to every home in the borough. However, we are aware that a small percentage of people have either not received or seen their calendar.